Complete academia sweetness!

Thank you Berkeley Publishing and Netgalley for a copy of this novel.

Every bit of this novel was just what I needed. The characters were well-developed and made me fall in love with this STEM-focused romance. I loved being thrust into the scientific world while partaking in a fun fake-dating trope. It was so well-done and intelligent. This story had maturity and discussed the role of females in a male-dominated field with grace and grit. I admire the author for tackling tough topics while giving readers a steamy romance that actually meant something and went somewhere.

Highly recommend!

Booksta peeps! This one was sooooo cute 🥰 I started and finished it in a day and I swear there was a smile on my face ALL day!

What I liked:
•a cute fake relationship between scientists
•nerdy banter & flirting
•supportive and caring friend group
•how dedicated Olive was to her research and work
•the SUPERIOR grump & sunshine love interests trope 🌞

This one comes out on September 14th, so if you didn’t pick it for your BOTM, I definitely recommend snagging this one for your next romcom!

Thank you to @alihazelwood and @berkleypub for the gifted e-arc in exchange for an honest review 💛

PhD candidate Olive is trying to convince her best friend that she's moved on from her old relationship, so she kisses the first man she sees in an effort to appear like she's on a date. The recipient of her kiss is the most notorious professor in her department Adam Carlsen. Olive is floored that Adam agrees to fake date her, but Olive isn't too worried about catching feelings...but maybe she should be.

Omg I love this book. New favorite book boyfriend alert. Adam is....everything. Grumpy, quiet, pining, devoted, swoony... Good job Olive.

All of the characters are very likable and Olive was very easy to root for. I just enjoyed everything about it. I could tell after only a few chapters that this would be a 5 star book. Looking forward to more books from this author!

Thank you to Netgalley and Berkley for the eARC in exchange for my review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Standout Quote: “HYPOTHESIS: When given a choice between A (a slightly inconveniencing situation) and B (a colossal shitshow with devastating consequences), I will inevitably end up selecting B.”

My thoughts:
🧪 @alihazelwood somehow managed to make a story that feels like star wars+ the Big Bang theory, but at the same time felt witty and sexy.
🧪I loved the start of every chapters hypotheses. I think they added just an extra layer of fun to the story.
🧪THESE CHARACTERS. There was so much diversity. In terms of sexuality, culturally, personality wise, and so much more.
🧪Olive is such an awkward little bean and I love her. I adore her affliction with pumpkin spice🎃. I also love the grumpy guppy that is Adam.
🧪There were so many serious topics also incorporated into this story. Such as sexism, academic politics and issues, academia way of life in general, and so much more.

Overall: I may have hated chemistry in school, but I certainly didn’t hate the amount of chemistry this book had. No but seriously I love Adam and Olive. I think that this book was funny (actually laugh out loud funny), kept a good pace throughout, had some familiar tropes but with their own twists, and overall I just loved it. Selfishly I wish this book was longer, I am just not ready to part with these characters yet. I will say I also appreciated the serious topics incorporated in this book. I haven’t always had the best experience in terms of higher education, or even my ability to separate my worth from my grades or how others see me, so I just felt very “seen” with this book which was a nice surprise. @alihazelwood is for sure an auto buy author for me now, this book deserves all the hype.

Publish date: September 14th, but @bookofthemonth has it as a pick this month if you want to get it early!!💚🧪

Thank you so much to @alihazelwood @netgalley @berkleypub @berkleyromance for this amazing arc. I absolutely NEED to get a physical copy of this book so I never have to part with it📖💙
•

The Love Hypothesis is going straight to my "favorites" shelf, and Adam is going on my book boyfriends list. I loved this book so much. It has so many great things going for it: women in STEM, supportive female friendship, fake relationship trope, great banter, and the best of all, a moody, broody, grumpy hero who goes gooey for the heroine. Once I started reading this book, I couldn't put it down and finished it in one day. I was thinking about Olive and Adam long after I finished reading The Love Hypothesis! I should mention trigger warnings for a parent's death and sexual harassment. Otherwise, I cannot recommend this book enough. It's one of the best romances I've read this year!

SO SWEET AND SWOONWORTHY. The dialogue and banter was top-notch! What an excellent debut. I just loved everything about this one - 100% recommend to romance fans.

I loved this book so much! I was literally texting my friend that I was imagining Adam Driver as the Male MC, and she told me this book used to be a Reylo fic?!?! I knew my fan-fiction-spidey senses were tingling for a reason. This book had all the tropes: the slow burn, grumpy paired with sunshine, fake dating. This book was perfection.

This was a great premise for a story, but I wanted more than what I got.

Olive Smith is a third year Ph.D. student in biology, at Stanford (YAY Women in STEM!!) She's alone in the world after the death of her mother when she was 16, and she hopes to continue to research pancreatic cancer in her mother's honor. She hasn't had much interest in (or luck with) relationships (she appeared to me to be demisexual, though that is never explicitly stated), so she usually doesn't bother dating. But, she recently dated a guy in her department a few times, Jeremy, which didn't work out. Partially because she realized her best friend Anh, and Jeremy had WAY more chemistry than she ever had with him. She wants Anh to feel free to date Jeremy without worrying about their friendship, so she lies and tells Anh she's already dating someone else. She randomly kisses the first person she sees in the hallway of the lab, who turns out to be Dr. Adam Carlsen.

Dr. Adam Carlsen is a young, hotshot scientist and professor, well known for being EXTREMELY harsh in his opinions and grading of students' work. When Olive kisses him, he's shocked. Afterward, he agrees to her silly fake dating scheme because it will help him too. Stanford isn't sure he's going to stick around, so they've put a freeze on some of his research funds, and he needs them free ASAP. Having a girlfriend might convince the school that he's staying put.

Adam and Olive definitely had chemistry from the start, but Olive basically passed it off as a fluke and wasn't going to address it at all. They agree to a weekly coffee date at the on-campus coffee shop, so plenty of people will see them together on a regular basis, and that's supposed to be it. But of course, it doesn't work out that way. They're constantly being drawn together more often than planned, and feelings start brewing before long.

Olive's roommate Malcolm was delightful, and I loved their relationship. And Olive, Malcolm, and Anh's close relationship as friends too. They really helped Olive out throughout the story, and she NEEDED that help, quite a few times. Adam's best friend, and co-worker, Dr. Holden Rodrigues was fun as well! They were the major side players here, other than another character who turns out to be quite villainous!

SO, a lot of my issues here were with Olive's lying. She just ended up lying so much, to everyone important in her life. It really bothered me, even though it technically started from a place of love for Anh, and wanting her to be happy and comfortable. She obviously has a lot of issues stemming from her mother's death, and her life growing up afterward, that she needs to address. I would've liked to see her addressing them at some point (i.e.: therapy, etc.) I also really didn't like the side plot with the villain, and I didn't love how it was all resolved either. That whole side plot was a bit shocking for a book that is selling itself as a rom-com. I didn't totally understand it's overall purpose. Also, just on a personal preference note, I would've KILLED to get into Adam's head. This is all in Olive's POV, and while many things along the way are obvious to the reader, though apparently not to Olive, I still would've preferred to have his POV too. I get why the author chose to omit it, based on things that come out later, but I still would've rather heard it all from him, I guess.

I enjoyed watching the progression of the relationship between Adam and Olive, and I really ended up liking Adam a lot. It was a VERY SLOW burn, which is not typically my jam, but the steamy times, when they happened, were great. Adam and Olive really seemed to be good for each other, but all I wanted was for them to be honest and open with one another. In my opinion, it took us too long to get there. There was an epilogue, but I didn't get all I wanted from that either.

Overall, the writing was quite propulsive, and kept me wanting to see what happened next. There were some fun parts, and even rom-com-worthy funny parts, but they didn't eclipse the issues I had. This one wasn't a big hit for me.

CONTENT WARNING: Death of a parent from cancer (off-page, in the past), Sexual harassment/unwanted advances/gaslighting of the heroine (on page - NOT the hero).

OHMYGOD! This was such a sweet and nice read I was literally smiling the whole time. It's a bubbly-girl-meets-serious-guy, teacher-student trope but not to the point where it gets pedophile vibes.

The female lead is a PHD student and make lead is a professor so the student-teacher trope isn't wierd at all.

I love the pace of this book, it's fast and there aren't any extra details and the writer gets straight into story telling which is what I loved.

If you're looking for a quick read to lift your mood or spend a nice evening, pick up this one because it's mushy and cute and bubbly and hilarious.

The Love Hypothesis is an adult contemporary romance novel by debut author Ali Hazelwood. I cannot even explain how much I loved this book. (but I shall try anyway) It was EXACTLY what I was looking for. The Love Hypothesis is romantic, funny, full of heart and banter, has book boyfriend level characters and made me fall in love right alongside Olive and Adam. I love that the Author of this book is also a women in the STEM field, and I love the amount of science that was woven into the story.

In The Love Hypothesis, we meet our main character Olive, who is a graduate student in the biology PhD program at Stanford. We find her in a convoluted situation, where to get her friend off her back (and make said friend feel ok dating Olive’s ex…yes I really said that) Olive throws her lips on the first unsuspecting male she runs into in the biology hallway. Except her lips landed on Dr. Adam Carlsen, who is a notorious jerk and big wig in the department. And so begins their comedy of fake-dating errors. And I loved every single second of it. This book is hilarious and so swoony. I can’t wait to see what Ali Hazelwood comes out with next because The Love Hypothesis is one of my favorite reads of 2021!

Once I picked up The Love Hypothesis I could not put it down. I stayed up way too late reading and now I am in one heck of a book hangover. I loved Olive’s counterbalance to the grumpiness that was Adam. But Adam is no where near the jerk that his reputation leads one to believe. I loved how he was with Olive. Their relationship was completely adorable. The Love Hypothesis is great for fans of the fake-relationship trope and for fans of all rom-com tropes because Olive has some great hypothesis about romantic comedies that made me giggle. The Love Hypothesis is a fantastic book. I loved it so much, that I can’t wait to re-read it!

As someone who recently went through grad school (but for public health), I immediately resonated with the prologue and "crying in the bathroom" (it was truly the best bonding moment for our cohort) set up. I can't say what the STEM experience is like, but I think Ali did a great job novelizing this experience and the pure terror grad students constantly face but it is also A NOVEL and shouldn't be taken as the end-all-be-all truth of that experience.

I liked THE LOVE HYPOTHESIS, but can't say I loved it. The more I think about a lot of the aspects of the story I feel like it got 75% of the way there but never QUITE made it for me. Olive was a great MC, I liked Adam but never felt like I fully understood his character and think this book may have benefitted more from dual POVs. Their fake dating to real emotions made sense to me logically but I didn't actually feel like we got that on the page (except that Adam thinks Olive is a smart-ass, which I definitely took away). And the twist at the end, we could all see from literally page one BUT even that didn't seem fully fleshed out to me.

I did enjoy some of the commentary of power dynamics in graduate school (and appreciated that this was acknowledged in the relationship plot early on) and just the stress in general of being in academics (hi, I am too, it kinda sucks sometimes). And both MCs had some fabulous BFFs and I always love a good supporting best friend.

The Love Hypothesis reads like the kind of AU fanfic that you get so invested in that you can’t set it down, which is not surprising as the book is basically a Reylo (Rey x Kylo Ren, Star Wars) AU fic filled with all of the best rom-com tropes. Fake-dating? Check. Asshole professor? Check. Over-involved best friends? Struggling grad student? Epic miscommunications? Check, check, and check.

Picking up this book (an uncorrected galley proof courtesy of NetGalley), I was instantly enamored with the characters. Olive Smith, a Stanford biology grad student with a fear of public speaking, a tragic back story, and a penchant for making things worse through little white lies is likable and relatable. Dr. Adam Carlsen, the asshole professor that she finds herself fake-dating, is unapproachable, intimidating, and has been known to have students flee their graduate dissertations in hysterics after his critiques.

The pairing starts off as a mutually beneficial situation. Olive’s best friend, Ahn, is in love with Olive’s ex, but won’t make a move because of the “girl code.” Olive attempts to convince Ahn that she’s over the guy by kissing the first pair of lips she sees when she’s caught not actually being on a date, but working overtime in the lab. Those lips? They belonged to one Dr. Adam Carlsen, whose funding has been frozen by the university due to him being a “flight-risk,” who they fear may accept a position with another institution as he has yet to set down roots. The charade will continue until Ahn is happily settled into her new relationship and Adam’s funds have been released. What could possibly go wrong, right?

A reader of Star Wars fanfic might be able to see the inspiration the series has on Hazelwood’s characters, but that is where the comparison ends. While I could imagine seeing the cast of the films playing these roles, the plot and characters are as far away from anything that Star Wars fans would recognize as can be. Throughout the book, the writing flows easily with the right amount of humor and tension to keep a reader from setting the book down (did I mention that I read this in one sitting?). The desire to know if the arrangement will fall apart, if Olive is going to move to Boston, if Malcolm is going to hook up with the other hot professor proved too strong to stop reading.

This was a quick and fluffy read that kept me awake far too late like only some of the best fanfic writers can. For lovers of fic, a good rom-com, or a reader just looking for a book that’s not going to break their heart in the end, I definitely recommend giving it a read. The Love Hypothesis is out on September 14th, 2021. Find it in bookstores or your local library!

I haven’t been this thrilled by a contemporary romance in a while. I devoured it in two days (it would have been one were it not for adulting responsibilities!).

It’s about a fake relationship between two scientists and does the fake dating and they-must-share-a-room tropes so well. There’s nerdy banter, great chemistry (hello stomach butterflies! 🦋), HOTNESS, and it’s also sweet and funny. The love interest is a smokin’ hot, brilliant, mercurial Stanford Professor who had me wanting to go back to grad school.

It’s just SO GOOD 👏🏻.

(Oh, and author @alihazelwood is a badass Professor of neuroscience in real life!)

Add this to your TBR, request it from your local library, and preorder it now. You won’t regret it!

Thank you to @berkleypub and @netgalley for providing an advance copy of this book for review purposes.

Don’t get me wrong this book is good, but I think all the hype led me to some disappointment. I found my self skipping pages over all the science stuff because I’m not here for all that and while it was well researched it just went on for too long. And *THAT* scene was.... awkward. I appreciate what the author was going for but it just was weird. Whole boob in mouth? Really? Overall, they did execute the fake boyfriend trope really well and it was super cute.

Love this book, loved it, loved it!! It was beautiful and entertaining. I've wanted to read it for a long time.

It all begins when Olivie kisses a stranger in the hallways of the Stanford department of science. She did it so that her best friend Anh can see them and date Olive's ex. It turns out that the one she ends up kissing is Adam Carlsen, who pretty much destroys students' research projects and has quite a quirky reputation. Because of this, the entire campus finds out that they are "dating" and that's how they start to pretend to have a relationship.

One of the clichés that I love the most is fake dating, as long as it's well developed and here it is. The plot focuses on the development of the relationship of both, it's a slow burn and the relationship between them is respectful, Adam is a real gentleman with Olive, I thought he would be a jerk because of his reputation, but he turned out to be an understanding person.

On the one hand, I managed to identify with Olive in certain aspects, she hasn't had it easy since she lost the only relative she had when she was a teenager and since then she has been alone making her way to be able to achieve her goals as a researcher. On the other hand, we have Adam who is a monster with his researchers, the treatment he has with them is brutal and that damages the relationship between him and Olive. But I understand his point as well as that of the researchers, it makes me sad since I know how it feels thinking that you are not enough.

Anyway, it was an entertaining read, I loved it. It makes me want to read more books written by the author.

And by the way, on this account, we hate Tom Benton.

OK, WHERE DO I EVEN BEGIN? If I could give this book 1000 stars, I would give it. It deserves all the stars in the world. What a beautiful, amazing debut for Ali Hazelwood. She is going to be a great author, I'm sure of that. I mean, she already is. And I've made it my personal mission to make everyone read this book, because it's so good. I can't stop thinking about it. I finished it last night at 1 AM and I went to sleep thinking about it and I woke up thinking about it. That's when I know it's an amazing book.

If you're a fan of the fake dating trope, you're going to fall in love with this book. I'm not a huge fan, but this book made me love it. The dynamic between the characters is pure perfection, the friendships and the relationships are so good. The main character, Olive, is such an amazing and strong woman, she overcomes so many of her fears throughout the book and I found her to be very inspiring and a very good motivation. As a woman in STEM myself, I felt for her in so many ways. And oh, don't get me started on Adam Carlsen. The broody, mysterious professor who makes his students cry, who is such an intriguing figure... and who happens to become Olive's fake-boyfriend. I love him so much, I CAN'T EXPLAIN. His character spoke to my heart, the tenderness underneath that tough facade was something that managed to melt my heart.

Olive and Adam are made for each other and I was so happy to see their fake relationship become a friendship and then evolve into something beautiful.
Also, this book is going to break your heart, I WARNED YOU! It's going to break it into a million pieces and then put it back together in such a beautiful way, you'll forget you had it broken in the first place.

What more can I say? If I haven't already convinced you to read this book, JUST...WHY? You have to give it a chance, it's A-MA-ZING!

Thank you NetGalley and Berkley Books for a digital ARC of The Love Hypothesis.

AHHH this book! If you like fake dating, banter, and/or the grumpy x sunshine trope definitely check this one out. I especially loved that “grumpy” was secretly very much a cinnamon roll character and I would love to get his POV of this story. I was also pleasantly surprised by the ace spectrum representation (demisexual) as it’s not something you’d think to find in adult romance novels. It made me swoon even more over Adam doing the bare minimum by respecting Olive. Also, as a current grad student and someone who relates to Olive a little too much, the depiction of academia hit HARD. I have a feeling this will be one of my favorite books of the year.

This book is every single thing I want from a contemporary romance. I fell in love with Olive and Adam from the jump, and every single page was a joy to read.

Olive was such a strong, independent, intelligent MC and she was relatable and hilarious to boot. Adam was a bit ole softie who needed the right woman to bring him out of his shell, and Olive was perfect for him.

Their banter was dry and witty - just how I like it - but their moments were filled with equal amounts of swoon and butterflies. I’m absolutely obsessed.

The misunderstanding-based conflict threatened to take away from the 5 stars, but the resolution made it all worth it. I cannot recommend this book enough!

Holy cuteness, Batman! Olive and Dr. Carlsen, ahem I mean Adam, were so friggin' adorable I couldn't keep the smile off of my face. Their banter was amazing and I loved seeing how Olive opened up around him and called him out for being grumpy and unapproachable. Olive made this book so fun and I adored her crazy, all-over-the-place, type of chatter. And Adam had a mysterious vibe about him that made me want to get to know him so much that I couldn't put the book down just dying to find out more.

The fake-dating trope is one that can easily become so cliche that it makes you roll your eyes. But for me this book didn't feel that way at all. It had moments that felt like a fresh spin on the trope and I actually loved that Olive sometimes even referenced some of those cliche type of scenes that would usually happen in books in this genre. It reminded me of how the movie Scream (One of my favorite movies) is a slasher film that has moments that make fun of other slasher films.

I do have to say that at times it was a little much and over the top with just how quirky she was, especially compared to the mostly broody and silent Adam. And they had some of those moments that I hate in romance novels where it's a little ridiculous just how simple things could have turned out if the two main characters just talked to each other about things instead of trying to solve them themselves.

But even though I did have moments that I could complain about I stand firm with my five star rating. I honestly debated it for a bit and if you know me or my reviews then you know that it is very rare that I give a book five stars. But this book deserves that rating from me. The reading experience, for me, is 100% worth it. I was smiling so hard at the banter between Olive and Adam that I felt like I was some 12 year old fangirling over some popstar. And when I finished I was on my friends voicemessages gushing over how cute this book was. Which again, is not normal for me.

When I first read the blurb for this book, I was charmed. I love STEM FMCs, I love competency porn, I love cranky, but brilliant MMCs being brought to their knees by love. I somehow missed the memo that this was a book that originated as Reylo fanfic (yes, missed that cover also - what can I say, sometimes, I’m real oblivious) and let me just say, I do not ship those 2 characters. Come at me all you want, I DO NOT CARE.

However, when I started reading the book, I liked it. Despite Olive’s tendency to pile on lies on top of lies, thus entrenching her in a predicament that got literally worse by the minute, I liked both the MCs, the setting, the side characters.

And then came reveal #1: Olive’s mother dies of pancreatic cancer when Olive is very young, she’s in foster care briefly until she’s 16 at which point she’s emancipated. The blurb makes no mention of parental illness, parental death, cancer, etc. And yes, this all happens in the past, off page, but the resulting emotional trauma from this is very much felt on the page so one cannot argue that this is not relevant information to include in the blurb. As a result of this loss, Olive is lonely and believes herself to be incapable of love. She believes everyone who she loves will be destined to leave her. As a result, she’s never had a serious relationship.

She also, though the book doesn’t explicitly state it, has the markers of being a demisexual. For a long time, she never felt sexual attraction for anyone and wondered if she was asexual. Upon meeting the MMC, she realizes she needs to trust the person and feel an emotional connection with them to have sexual attraction. I’m not sure why the word itself was never used in the book, but the way her sexual attraction to Adam is described, that is my interpretation.

She is a Ph.D candidate in the same lab where Adam Carlsen is a young, attractive professor. He’s moody and ill-mannered and makes his students cry and when circumstances force Olive to come up with a date in order to make her best friend believe she’s no longer pining for her ex, it’s Adam who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

While I love a fake romance trope, I will say one of the things that really put me off this story initially was Olive’s tendency to lie, to her friends, to her lab mates, and then, even to Adam. At some point, it all became too much and I started having issues with Olive and wondering why I should root for a character who just lies to everyone.

But, lets set that aside. Olive is a biology PH.D student looking for a lab to run her experiment and enter, Tom Benton, the villain. Tom is an old friend of Adam’s, they did their PH.Ds together at Harvard and now are collaborating on other sciency things. Olive, before even meeting Adam, sets up a meeting with Tom, asking to work with him at Harvard. Tom comes to town to meet with Adam and offers to meet with Olive as well and things go well and Olive has an offer from Tom.

Cut to the end of the book when all parties are in Boston for a work conference where Olive is presenting on the same panel as Tom.

And here we have, at about the 70% point, on page sexual assault by Tom of Olive. I….do not understand why this was here or necessary or why it was written the way it is. Tom is written almost as a cartoon villain - you can spot him a mile away. The scene is so horrific but also OTT, and I guess I don’t know what it really added to the story except for some truly unnecessary drama. (Let me be clear, Tom doesn’t rape Olive, he basically makes unwanted advances and then says some really vile things to her). Add to that the reaction that follows: Olive is essentially threatened by Tom to keep quiet because no one will believe her. That part is actually very believable. She goes back to the hotel room she’s sharing with Adam, proceeds to have an emotional break down and when Adam finds her, she vaguely tells him what was said but not by whom, not wanting to reveal that his friend is an asshole. And then, they have sex for the first and only time in the book and I’m not going to sit here in judgment of how people react to trauma and grief but I just found that entire scene very off-putting.

Ultimately things come to a head and Tom is found out because Olive recorded her talk and forgot to stop recording so essentially everything Tom did and said was caught on camera. However, it takes Olive’s friends and one of Adam’s other friend (also a professor) to convince her to come forward with the truth and I have to say, that was my least favorite part of the book. I would have loved to have seen Olive with more power and agency, saying, yes, I have proof, and just do this without her friends essentially browbeating her to do it. And I can understand that experience that trauma would have made her freeze, made unable to act and take action.

But then, the problem is, right after the truth is revealed and Adam goes all caveman on Tom, the book basically cuts to…a double date with Adam and Olive and their respective best friends who are also now dating. And the four of them sit at a Chinese restaurant joking and having fun and completely ignoring this HUGE THING that Olive just went through that resulted in Tom being fired and I don’t understand. Like, I literally do not understand why this was written this way. You want to add heavy themes to a book that’s marketed as a rom com, then you cannot just have this incredibly painful moment for the protagonist without any emotional follow up and then cut to a cutesy double date with joking and teasing and flirting. It. Doesn’t. Work.

Finally, (I KNOW, this review is long, I’m SORRY, I just have a lot of THOUGHTS ok?!?) at the end, when Olive is making her grand declaration to Adam, she says that she doesn’t know why she covers herself up with so many lies but she needs to figure that out. And then they basically have their HEA. Ok, first of all, Olive has issues, no one is disputing that. Losing her mother so young and basically being on her own since she was 16 has to take its toll on a person. I just feel like there’s one sentence of Olive being self-aware and then just moving on. And frankly it feels like such a disservice. Olive should maybe take a beat and get some therapy before embarking on what’s really the first serious relationship of her entire life.

I’m also going to add a note for the publisher: please stop marketing books as light, fluffy rom-coms and not mentioning the heavy themes in the book. This book contains parental death from cancer and on page sexual assault, neither of which is mentioned in the blurb. Apparently, the author has a posted CWs on her website which I do appreciate but let me be honest, no one is going to go looking on an author’s website for CWs, especially a debut author. At the very least, if you don’t want to spell it out in the blurb, put a note on the first page directing readers to the author’s website for CWs. Do SOMETHING. You’re not doing ANYTHING and people could go into this book, completely oblivious to the heavy themes, and be triggered and that’s NOT OK.

Anyway, this book had problems, I know a lot of people liked or even loved it. I obviously didn’t.

ARC courtesy of publisher, opinions are all mine.